CHAPTER XIIIThe showers returned in the night. They kept Alice company during several sleepless hours. In the morning the sun was out. It was Sunday and when Annie brought her mistress her rolls and chocolate Alice asked the maid if she had been to church."Kate and I went to early church," said Annie."And what time is late church, Annie?""Ten thirty, Mrs. MacBirney.""I am going myself this morning.""And what will you wear?""Anything that is cool."Alice was thinking less of what she should wear than of how she should tell her husband that she had resolved upon going to church. Painful experience had taught her what ridicule and resource of conjugal meanness to expect whenever she found courage to say she meant to go to church. Yet hope, consoling phantom, always suggested that her husband the next time might prove more amenable to reason.When at last she managed casually to mention her momentous resolve, MacBirney showed that he had lost none of his alertness on the subject. He made use first of surprise to express his annoyance. "To church?" Then he gave vent to a contemptuous exclamation uttered with a semblance of good-natured indifference. "I thought you had got that notion pretty well out of your head, Alice.""You have got it pretty well out for me, Walter. Sometimes it comes back. It came this morning--after a wakeful night. I haven't been for a long time.""What church do you want to go to?"His disingenuousness did not stir her. "To my own, of course. There is a little church in the village, you know.""Oh, that frame affair, yes. Awfully cheap looking, isn't it? And it threatens rain again. Don't mind getting wet?""Oh, no, I'll take the victoria.""You can't; Peters is going to drive me over to The Towers.""Then give me one of the cars.""I understand they are both out of order.""Oh, Walter! Can't you have Peters drive you to The Towers after he takes me to Sunbury?""I have an engagement with Robert Kimberly at eleven o'clock.""Could you change it a little, do you think, Walter?""An engagement with Robert Kimberly!""Or be just a little late for it?"MacBirney used his opportunity to advantage. "Keephimwaiting! Alice, when you get an idea into your head about going to church you lose your common-sense."She turned to the window to look at the sky. "I can't walk," she said hopelessly. Her husband made no comment. As her eyes turned toward the distant Towers she remembered that Robert Kimberly the evening before had asked--and so insistently that it had been one of the causes of her wakefulness--for permission to bring over in the morning some grapes from his hot-houses. He had wanted to come at eleven o'clock and she had assured him she should not be at home--this because, during some uneasy moments when they were close together in the car, she had resolved that the next morning she should seek if only for an hour an influence long neglected but quite removed from his. It was clear to her as she now stood at the window, that Kimberly had sought every chance to be at her personal service at eleven o'clock, even though her husband professed an engagement with him."Couldn't Peters," she asked, turning again to MacBirney, "drive me down half an hour earlier--before you go? I can wait at the church till he comes back after me?"MacBirney was reading the stock-market reports in the morning paper. "All right," he said curtly.She was contained this time. There had been occasions when scenes such as this had brought hot tears, but five years of steady battering had fairly subdued Alice.At high mass, an hour later, villagers saw a fine lady--a Second Lake lady, they shrewdly fancied from the carriage that brought her--kneeling among them in a pew close to the altar, and quite oblivious of those about her, kneeling, too, at times when they stood or sat; kneeling often with her face--which they thought pretty--hidden in her hands as if it somehow had offended; kneeling from the credo until the stragglers in the vestibule and about the church door began to slip away from the last gospel. There was an unusual stir about the church because it was a confirmation Sunday and an archbishop, a white-haired man who had once been in charge of the little Sunbury parish himself, was present.Alice followed the last of the congregation out of the door and into the village sunshine. She looked up and down the country road for her horses but none were in sight. Below the church where the farmers' rigs stood, a big motor-car watched by village boys was waiting. They knew that the car, with its black and olive trimmings, was from The Towers because they were familiar with the livery of the villa grooms.Their curiosity was rewarded when they saw the fine lady come out of the church. The instant she appeared a great gentleman stepped from the black tonneau and, lifting his hat very high, hastened across the muddy road to greet her--certainly she made a picture as she stood on the church steps in her tan pongee gown with her brown hair curling under a rose-wreathed Leghorn hat.Her heart gave a frightened jump when she saw who was coming. But when the gentleman spoke, his voice was so quiet that even those loitering near could not hear his words. There was some discussion between the two. His slight gestures as they talked, seemed to indicate something of explanation and something of defence. Then a suggestion of urgency appeared in his manner. The fine lady resisted.From under her pongee parasol she looked longingly up the road and down for her horses, but for a while no horses came. At last a carriage looking like her own did come down the lake road and she hoped for a moment. Then as the carriage drove rapidly past her face fell.The great gentleman indicated his annoyance at the insolent mud that spattered from the carriage wheel by a look, but he kept quite near to the fine lady and his eyes fell very kindly on her pink cheeks. Her carriage did not come even after they had gone to his car and seated themselves in the tonneau to await it. He was too clever to hurry her. He allowed her to wait until she saw her case was quite hopeless, then she told him he might drive her home."I came," he explained, answering an annoyed note in a second question that she asked, "because I understood you were going to church----""But I did not say I was.""I must have dreamed it."Brice, sitting at the wheel in front of them, smiled--but only within his heart--when this came to his ears; because it was Brice who had been asked during the morning where Mrs. MacBirney was and Brice who had reported. He was senior to Peters, senior to all the Second Lake coachmen and chauffeurs, and usually found out whatever he wanted to find out."At any rate," Kimberly laughed good-naturedly, "I have been waiting here half an hour for you."Brice knew that this was true to the minute, for in that half-hour there had been many glances at two good watches and a hamper of hot-house grapes. Brice himself, since a certain missed train, involving language that lingered yet in his ears, carried a good watch.But to-day not even amiable profanity, which Brice recalled as normal during extended waits, had accompanied the unusual detention. No messenger had been despatched to sound the young village priest with a view of expediting the mass and the fine lady had been in nowise interrupted during her lengthened devotions. Kimberly, in this instance, had truthfully been a model of patience."These are the grapes," Brice heard behind him, as he let the machine out a bit and fancied the top of the hamper being raised. "Aren't they exceptional? I found the vines in Algeria. There are lilies on this side."An expression of involuntary admiration came from the tonneau. "Assumption lilies! For your sister?""No, for you. They are to celebrate the feast.""The feast? Why, of course!" Then came a categorical question, animated but delivered with keenness: "How did you know that to-day is the feast of the Assumption?"A bland evasion followed. "I supposed that every one knew the fifteenth of August is the feast of the Assumption. Taste this grape.""I am very sureyoudidn't know.""But Idid. Taste the grape.""Who told you?""Whence have you the faculties of the Inquisition? Why do you rack me with questions?""I begin to suspect, Mr. Kimberly, that you belong on the rack.""No doubt. At least I have spent most of my life there.""Come, please! Who told you?""Francis, of course; now will you taste this grape?"CHAPTER XIVWhen MacBirney reached home with the victoria Alice had not yet taken off her hat, and a maid was bringing vases for the lilies. He had been driving toward Sea Ridge and taken the wrong road and was sorry for his delay in getting to the church. Alice accepted his excuses in good part. He tried to explain his misunderstanding about the engagement with Kimberly. She relieved his endeavors by making everything easy, telling him finally how Kimberly had brought her home and had left the grapes and lilies. When the two sat down at luncheon, MacBirney noticed Alice's preoccupation; she admitted she had a slight headache. She was glad, however, to have him ask her to go for a long motor drive in the afternoon, thinking the air would do her good, and they spent three hours together.When they got home it was dusk. The dinner served on the porch was satisfying and the day which had opened with so little of promise seemed to do better at the close. Indeed, Alice all day had sought quiet because she had something to say which she was resolved to say this day. After dinner she remained with her husband in the moonlight. He was talking, over his cigar, of an idea for adding a strip of woodland to the lower end of their new estate, when she interrupted him."Should you be greatly shocked, Walter, if I said I wish we could go away from here?" She was leaning toward him on the arm of her chair when she spoke and her hands were clasped.His astonishment was genuine. "What do you mean?""I don't know. Yet I feel as if we ought to go, Walter.""What for?"She was looking earnestly at him, but in the shadow he could not see, though he felt, her eyes."It is hard to explain." She paused a moment. "These people are delightful; you know I like them as much as you do."MacBirney took his cigar from his mouth to express his surprise. "I thought you were crazy about the place and the people and everything else," he exclaimed. "I thought this was just what you were looking for! You've said so much about refined luxury and lovely manners----""I am thinking of all that." There was enough in her tone of an intention to be heard to cause him to forget his favorite expedient of drowning the subject in a flood of words. "But with all this, or to enjoy it all, one needs peace of mind, and my peace of mind is becoming disturbed."Quite misunderstanding her, MacBirney thought she referred to the question of church-going, and that subject offered so much delicate ground that Alice continued without molestation."It is very hard to say what I meant to say, without saying too little or too much. You know, Walter, you were worried at one time about how Mr. Robert Kimberly would look at your proposals, and you told me you wanted me to be agreeable to him. And without treating him differently from any one else here, I have tried to pay particular regard to what he had to say and everything of that kind. It is awfully hard to specify," she hesitated in perplexity. "I am sure I haven't discriminated him in any way from his brother, or Mr. De Castro, for instance. But I have always shown an interest in things he had to point out, and he seemed to enjoy--perhaps more than the others--pointing things out. And----""Well?""It seems to me now as if he has begun to take an interest in everythingIdo----"Her husband became jocular. "Oh, has he?"Alice's words came at last bluntly. "And it completely upsets me, Walter."MacBirney laughed again. "Why so?"She took refuge in a shade of annoyance. "Because I don't like to think about it.""Think about what?""About any man's--if I must say it--paying attention to me, except my husband.""Now you are hitting me, aren't you, Alice? You are pretty clever, after all," declared MacBirney still laughing.She threw herself back in her chair. "Oh, Walter, you don't understand at all! Nothing could be further from what I am thinking. I ought not to say he has been attentive enough to speak of. It is not that I dislike Mr. Kimberly. But he does somehow make me uncomfortable. Perhaps I don't understand their way here.""Why, that is all there is to it, Alice. It's merely their way. Give it no thought. He is simply being agreeable. Don't imagine that every man that sends you flowers is interested in you. Is that all, Allie?""Yes." Her acuteness divined about what he would reply. "And," she added, "I think, however foolish it may sound, it is enough.""Don't worry about bridges you will never have to cross. That's the motto I've followed.""Yes, I know, but----""Just a moment. All you have to do is to treat everybody alike.""But, Walter----""You would have to do that anywhere--shouldn't you? Of course. Suppose we should go somewhere else and find a man that threatened to become an admirer----""Don't use such a word!""Call it what you please--we can't keep moving away from that kind of a possibility, can we?""Still, Walter, I feel as if we might get away from here. I have merely told you exactly what I thought.""We can't get away. This is where everything is done in the sugar business. This is the little world where the big moves are decided upon. If you are not here, you are not in it. We are in the swim now; it took long enough to get in it, God knows. Now let us stay. You can take care of yourself, can't you?""How can you ask me!"He pursued her with a touch of harshness. "How can I ask you? Aren't you talking about running away from a situation?Idon't run away from situations. I call the man or woman that runs away from a situation, a coward. Face it down, work it out--don't dodge it."MacBirney finished without interruption.In the living room the telephone bell rang. He went in to answer it and his wife heard him a moment in conversation. Then on the garage wire he called up the chauffeur and ordered a car. Coming out again on the porch he explained: "Lottie wants us to come over.""Lottie?" There was a shade of resentment, almost of contempt, in Alice's echo and inquiry."Lottie Nelson.""Don't call her Lottie, Walter.""She calls me Walter.""She has no business to. What did you tell her? Don't let us go out to-night.""It is a little celebration of some kind and I told her we would come.""My head has ached all day.""It will do your head good. Come on. I told her we were coming."CHAPTER XVThey found a lively party at the Nelsons'. Guyot was there, with Lambert, thick-lipped and voluble. Dora Morgan with Doane and Cready Hamilton had come, worn and bedraggled, from a New England motoring trip. Dora, still quite hoarse, was singing a music-hall song when the MacBirneys entered the room.She stopped. "My ears are crazy to-night--I can't sing," she complained, responding to Alice's greeting. "I feel as if there were a motor in my head. Tired? Oh, no, not a bit. But the dust!" Her smile died and her brows rose till her pretty eyes shone full. She threw her expiring energy into two husky words: "Somethingfierce!"Dolly and her husband with Imogene and Charles had responded to Lottie's invitation, and Robert Kimberly came later with Fritzie Venable. Dolly greeted Alice with apologies. "I am here," she admitted with untroubled contempt, "but not present. I wanted to see what Lambert looks like. We hear so much about his discoveries. Robert doesn't think much of them."Mrs. Nelson, languidly composed, led MacBirney to the men who were in an alcove off the music room. Near them sat Robert Kimberly talking to Imogene. Dora could not be coaxed to sing again. But the hostess meant to force the fighting for a good time. Dora joined the men and Guyot, under Nelson's wing, came over to meet Alice, who had taken refuge with Dolly. At a time when the groups were changing, Nelson brought Lambert over. But neither Alice nor Dolly made objection when his host took him away again.Kimberly came after a while with Fritzie to Alice's divan and, standing behind it, tried by conversation and such attraction of manner as he could offer, to interest Alice. He failed to waken any response. She quite understood a woman's refuge from what she wishes to avoid and persevered in being indifferent to every effort.Kimberly, not slow to perceive, left presently for the party in the dining-room. But even as he walked away, Alice's attitude toward him called to her mind a saying of Fritzie's, that it is not pleasant to be unpleasant to pleasant people, even if it is unpleasant to be pleasant to unpleasant people."Were you tired after yesterday's ride?" asked Dolly of Alice."Not too tired.""Robert told you about Tennie Morgan's death."Alice looked at her inquiringly. "How did you know?""You were in the Morgan chapel together. And you looked upset when you came back. I had promised to tell you the story sometime myself. I know how easy it is to get a false impression concerning family skeletons. So I asked Robert about it the minute you left the car, and I was annoyed beyond everything when he said he had told you the whole story.""But dear Mrs. De Castro! Why should you be annoyed?"Dolly answered with decision: "Robert has no business ever to speak of the affair." Alice could not dispute her and Dolly went on: "I know just how he would talk about it. Not that I know what he said to you. But it would be like him to take very much more of the blame on himself than belongs to him. Men, my dear, look at these things differently from women, and usually make less of them than women do. In this case it is exactly the reverse. Robert has always had an exaggerated idea of his responsibility in the tragedy--that is why it annoys me ever to have him speak about it. I know my brother better, I think, than anybody alive knows him, and I am perfectly familiar with all the circumstances. I know what I am talking about."Very much in earnest Dolly settled back. "To begin with, Tennie was an abnormal boy. He was as delicate in his mental texture as cobweb lace. His sensitiveness was something incredible and twenty things might have happened to upset his mental balance. No one, my dear, likes to talk state secrets.""Pray do not, then. It really is not necessary," pleaded Alice."Oh, it is," said Dolly decidedly, "I want you to understand. Suicide has been a spectre to the Kimberlys for ages. Two generations ago Schuyler Kimberly committed suicide at sixty-six--think of it! Oh! I could tell you stories. There has been no suicide in this generation. But the shadow," Dolly's tones were calm but inflected with a burden of what cannot be helped may as well be admitted, "seems only to have passed it to fall upon the next in poor Tennie. Two years afterward they found his mother dead one morning in bed. I don't know what the trouble was--it was in Florence. Nobody knows--there was just a little white froth on her lips. The doctors said heart disease. She was a strange woman, Bertha, strong-willed and self-indulgent--like all the rest of us.""Don't say that of yourself. You are not self-indulgent, you are generous.""I am both, dear. But I know the Kimberlys, men and women, first and last, and that is why I do not want you to get wrong impressions of them. My brother Robert isn't a saint, neither is Charles. But compare them with the average men of their own family; compare them with the average men in their own situation in life; compare them with the Nelsons and the Doanes; compare them with that old man that Robert is so patient with! Compare them, my dear, to the men everywhere in the world they move in--I don't think the Kimberly men of this generation need apologize particularly."Robert was so completely stunned by Tennie's death that for years I did not know what would happen. Then a great industrial crisis came in our affairs, though afterward it seemed, in a way, providential. Poor old Uncle John got it into his head he could make sugar out of corn and ended by nearly ruining us all. If things had gone on we should all have been living in apartments within another year. When we were so deep in the thing that the end was in sight we went to Robert on our knees, and begged him to take hold of the business and save the family--oh, it had come quite to that. He had been doing absolutely nothing for a year and I feared all sorts of things about him. But he listened anddidtake hold and made the business so big--well, dear heart, you have some idea what it is now when they can take over a lot of factories, such as those of your husband and his associates, on one year's profits. I suppose, of course, these are state secrets--you mustn't repeat them----""Certainly not.""And for years they have been the largest lenders of ready money in the Street. So you can't wonder that we think a great deal of Robert. And he likes you--I can see that. He has been more natural since you came here than for years.""Surely your brothers never can say they have not a devoted sister.""I can't account for it," persisted Dolly, continuing. "It is just that your influence is a good one on him; no one can explain those things. I thought for years he would never be influenced by any woman again. You've seen how this one," Dolly tossed her head in disgust as she indicated Lottie Nelson, then passing, "throws herself at him." With the last words Dolly rose to say she was going home. Imogene was ready to join her, and Lottie's protests were of no avail. Charles was upstairs conferring with Nelson and Imogene went up to get him.Alice walked to the dining-room. Her husband, in an uncommonly good-humor, was drinking with their hostess. In the centre of the room, Hamilton, Guyot, Lambert, and Dora Morgan sat at the large table. Guyot offered Alice a chair. She sat down and found him entertaining. He took her after a time into the reception room where Lottie had hung a Degas that Guyot had brought over for her. Alice admired the fascinating swiftness and sureness of touch but did not agree with Guyot that the charm was due to the merit of color over line. When the two returned to the dining-room, Kimberly stood at a cellaret with Fritzie.Lottie and MacBirney sat with the group at the big table. "Oh, Robert," Lottie called to Kimberly as Alice appeared in the doorway, "mix me a cocktail."Turning, Kimberly saw Alice: "I am out of practice, Lottie," he said."Give me some plain whiskey then."Kimberly's shortness of manner indicated his annoyance. "You have that at your hand," he said sitting down."How rude, Robert," retorted Lottie, with assumed impatience. She glanced loftily around. "Walter," she exclaimed, looking across the table at Alice's husband and taking Alice's breath away with the appeal, "give me some whiskey.""Certainly, Mrs. Nelson.""No, stop; mix me a cocktail.""Is your husband an expert, Mrs. MacBirney?" asked Guyot as MacBirney rose."Not to my knowledge," answered Alice frankly. "I hope," she added, with a touch of asperity as her husband stepped to a sideboard, "that Mrs. Nelson is not fastidious.""It is disgusting the way my friends are behaving," complained Lottie turning to Lambert. "This is my birthday----""Your birthday!""That is why you are all here. And whoever refuses now to drink my health I cast off forever.""Is this a regular birthday or are you springing an extra on us?" demanded Fritzie."Go on, MacBirney, with your mixture," exclaimed Lambert, "I'll serve at the table. You are going to join us, of course, Mrs. MacBirney?"Alice answered in trepidation: "It must be something very light for me.""Try whiskey, Mrs. MacBirney," suggested Dora Morgan benevolently, "it is really the easiest of all."Alice grew nervous. Kimberly, without speaking, pushed a half-filled glass toward her. She looked at him in distress. "That will not hurt you," he said curtly.The men were talking Belgian politics. Lambert was explaining the antiquated customs of the reactionaries and the battle of the liberals for the laicizing of education. He dwelt on the stubbornness of the clericals and the difficulties met with in modernizing their following.Kimberly either through natural dislike for Lambert or mere stubbornness objected to the specific instances of mediævalism adduced and soon had the energetic chemist nettled. "What do you know about the subject?" demanded Lambert at length. "Are you a Catholic?""I am not a Catholic," returned Kimberly amiably. "I am as far as possible, I suppose, from being one. The doors of the church are wide, but if we can believe even a small part of what is printed of us they would have to be broadened materially to take in American refiners.""If you are not a Catholic, what are you?" persisted Lambert with heat."I have one serious religious conviction; that is, that there are just two perfectly managed human institutions; one, the Standard Oil Company, the other the Catholic Church."There was now a chance to drop the controversy and the women together tried to effect a diversion. But Lambert's lips parted over his white teeth in a smile. "I have noticed sometimes that what we know least about we talk best about." Kimberly stirred languidly. "I was born of Catholic parents," continued Lambert, "baptized in the Catholic Church, educated in it. I should know something about it, shouldn't I? You, Mr. Kimberly, must admit you know nothing about it." Kimberly snorted a little. "All the same, I take priests' fables for what they are worth," added Lambert; "such, for example, as the Resurrection of Christ." Lambert laughed heartily. Fritzie looked uneasily at Alice as the words fell. Her cheeks were crimsoned."Can a central fact of Christianity such as the Resurrection fairly be called a priests' fable?" asked Kimberly."Why not?" demanded Lambert with contemptuous brevity. "None but fossilized Catholics believe such nonsense!""There are still some Protestants left," suggested Kimberly mildly."No priest dictates to me," continued the chemist, aroused. "No superstition for me. I want Catholics educated, enlightened, made free. I should know something about the church, should I not? You admit you know nothing----""No, I did not admit that," returned Kimberly. "You admitted it for me. And you asked me a moment ago what I was. Lambert, what are you?""I am a Catholic--not a clerical!" Lambert emphasized the words by looking from one to another in the circle. Kimberly spread one of his strong hands on the table. Fritzie watching him shrank back a little."You a Catholic?" Kimberly echoed slowly. "Oh, no; this is a mistake." His hand closed. "You say you were born a Catholic. And you ridicule the very corner-stone of your faith. The last time I met you, you were talking the same sort of stuff. I wonder if you have any idea what it has cost humanity to give you the faith you sneer at, Lambert? To give you Catholic parents, men nineteen hundred years ago allowed themselves to be nailed to crosses and torn by dogs. Boys hardly seven years old withstood starvation and scourging and boys of fifteen were burned in pagan amphitheatres that you might be born a Christian; female slaves were thrown into boiling oil to give you the privilege of faith; delicate women died in shameful agonies and Roman maidens suffered their bodies to be torn to pieces with red-hot irons to give you a Christian mother--and you sit here to-night and ridicule the Resurrection of Christ! Call yourself liberal, Lambert; call yourself enlightened; call yourself Modern; but for God's sake don't call yourself a Catholic.""Stop a moment!" cried Lambert at white heat.Lottie put out her arm. "Don't let's be cross," she said with deliberate but unmistakable authority. "I hate a row." She turned her languid eyes on MacBirney. "Walter, what are these people drinking that makes them act in this way? Do give Mr. Kimberly something else; he began it."Kimberly made no effort to soothe any one's feelings. And when Fritzie and Alice found an excuse to leave the room he rose and walked leisurely into the hall after them.The three talked a few moments. A sound of hilarity came from the music room. Alice looked uneasily down the hall."I never knew your husband could sing," said Fritzie.CHAPTER XVIIt dawned only gradually on Alice that her husband was developing a surprising tendency. He walked into the life that went on at the Nelson home as if he had been born to it. From an existence absorbed in the pursuit of business he gave himself for the moment to one absorbed in pursuit of the frivolous. Alice wondered how he could find anything in Lottie Nelson and her following to interest him; but her husband had offered two or three unpleasant, even distressing, surprises within as few years and she took this new one with less consternation than if it had been the first.Yet it was impossible not to feel annoyance. Lottie Nelson, in what she would have termed an innocent way, for she cared nothing for MacBirney, in effect appropriated him, and Alice began to imagine herself almost third in the situation.Tact served to carry the humiliated wife over some of the more flagrant breaches of manners that Mrs. Nelson did not hesitate at, if they served her caprice. MacBirney became "Walter" to her everywhere. She would call him from the city in the morning or from his bed at night; no hour was too early to summon him and none too late. The invitations to the Nelsons' evenings were extended at first both to Alice and to him. Alice accepted them in the beginning with a hopeless sort of protest, knowing that her husband would go anyway and persuading herself that it was better to go with him. If she went, she could not enjoy herself. Drinking was an essential feature of these occasions and Alice's efforts to avoid it made her the object of a ridicule on Lottie's part that she took no pains to conceal.It was at these gatherings that Alice began to look with a degree of hope for a presence she would otherwise rather have avoided. Kimberly when he came, which was not often, brought to her a sense of relief because experience had shown that he would seek to shield her from embarrassment rather than to expose her to it.Lottie liked on every occasion to assume to manage Kimberly together with the other men of her acquaintance. But from being, at first, complaisant, or at least not unruly, Kimberly developed mulish tendencies. He would not, in fact, be managed. When Lottie attempted to force him there were outbreaks. One came about over Alice, she being a subject on which both were sensitive.Alice, seeking once at the De Castros' to escape both the burden of excusing herself and of drinking with the company, appealed directly to Kimberly. "Mix me something mild, will you, please, Mr. Kimberly?"Kimberly made ready. Lottie flushed with irritation. "Oh, Robert!" She leaned backward in her chair and spoke softly over her fan. "Mix me something mild, too, won't you?"He ignored Lottie's first request but she was foolish enough to repeat it. Kimberly checked the seltzer he was pouring long enough to reply to her: "What do you mean, Lottie? 'Mix you something mild!' You were drinking raw whiskey at dinner to-night. Can you never understand that all women haven't the palates of ostriches?" He pushed a glass toward Alice. "I don't know how it will taste."Lottie turned angrily away."Now I have made trouble," said Alice."No," answered Kimberly imperturbably, "Mrs. Nelson made trouble for herself. I'm sorry to be rude, but she seems lately to enjoy baiting me."Kimberly appeared less and less at the Nelsons' and the coolness between him and Lottie increased.She was too keen not to notice that he never came to her house unless Alice came and that served to increase her pique. Such revenge as she could take in making a follower of MacBirney she took.Alice chafed under the situation and made every effort to ignore it. When matters got to a point where they became intolerable she uttered a protest and what she dreaded followed--an unpleasant scene with her husband. While she feared that succeeding quarrels of this kind would end in something terrible, they ended, in matter of fact, very much alike. People quarrel, as they rejoice or grieve, temperamentally, and a wife placed as Alice was placed must needs in the end submit or do worse. MacBirney ridiculed a little, bullied a little, consoled a little, promised a little, and urged his wife to give up silly, old-fashioned ideas and "broaden out."He told her she must look at manners and customs as other people looked at them. When Alice protested against Lottie Nelson's calling him early and late on the telephone and receiving him in her room in the morning--MacBirney had once indiscreetly admitted that she sometimes did this--he declared these were no incidents for grievance. If any one were to complain, Nelson, surely, should be the one. Alice maintained that it was indecent. Her husband retorted that it was merely her way, that Lottie often received Robert Kimberly in this way--though this, so far as Robert was concerned, was a fiction--and that nobody looked at the custom as Alice did. However, he promised to amend--anything, he pleaded, but an everlasting row.Alice had already begun to hate herself in these futile scenes; to hate the emotion they cost; to hate her heartaches and helplessness. She learned to endure more and more before engaging in them, to care less and less for what her husband said in them, less for what he did after them, less for trying to come to any sort of an understanding with him.In spite of all, however, she was not minded to surrender her husband willingly to another woman. She even convinced herself that as his wife she was not lively enough and resolved if he wanted gayety he should have it at home. The moment she conceived the notion she threw the gage at Lottie's aggressive head. Dolly De Castro, who saw and understood, warmly approved. "Consideration and peaceable methods are wasted on that kind of a woman. Humiliate her, my dear, and she will fawn at your feet," said Dolly unreservedly.Alice was no novice in the art of entertaining; it remained only for her to turn her capabilities to account. She made herself mistress now of the telephone appointment, of the motoring lunch, of the dining-room gayety. Nelson himself complimented her on the success with which she had stocked her liquor cabinets.She conceived an ambition for a wine cellar really worth while and abandoned it only when Robert Kimberly intimated that in this something more essential than ample means and the desire to achieve were necessary. But while gently discouraging her own idea as being impractical, he begged her at the same time to make use of The Towers' cellars, which he complained had fallen wholly into disuse; and was deterred only with the utmost difficulty from sending over with his baskets of flowers from the gardens of The Towers, baskets of wines that Nelson and Doane with their trained palates would have stared at if served by Alice. But MacBirney without these aids was put at the very front of dinner hosts and his table was given a presage that surprised him more than any one else. As a consequence, Cedar Lodge invitations were not declined, unless perhaps at times by Robert Kimberly.He became less and less frequently a guest at Alice's entertainments, and not to be able to count on him as one in her new activities came after a time as a realization not altogether welcome. His declining, which at first relieved her fears of seeing him too often, became more of a vexation than she liked to admit.Steadily refusing herself, whenever possible, to go to the Nelsons' she could hear only through her husband of those who frequented Lottie's suppers, and of the names MacBirney mentioned none came oftener than that of Robert Kimberly. Every time she heard it she resented his preferring another woman's hospitalities, especially those of a woman he professed not to like.Mortifying some of her own pride she even consented to go at times to the Nelsons' with her husband to meet Kimberly there and rebuke him. Then, too, she resolved to humiliate herself enough to the hateful woman who so vexed her to observe just how she made things attractive for her guests; reasoning that Kimberly found some entertainment at Lottie's which he missed at Cedar Lodge.Being in the fight, one must win and Alice meant to make Lottie Nelson weary of her warfare. But somehow she could not meet Robert Kimberly at the Nelsons'. When she went he was never there. Moreover, at those infrequent intervals in which he came to her own house he seemed ill entertained. At times she caught his eye when she was in high humor herself--telling a story or following her guests in their own lively vein--regarding her in a curious or critical way; and when in this fashion things were going at their best, Kimberly seemed never quite to enter into the mirth.His indifference annoyed her so that as a guest she would have given him up. Yet this would involve a social loss not pleasant to face. Her invitations continued, and his regrets were frequent. Alice concluded she had in some way displeased him.
CHAPTER XIII
The showers returned in the night. They kept Alice company during several sleepless hours. In the morning the sun was out. It was Sunday and when Annie brought her mistress her rolls and chocolate Alice asked the maid if she had been to church.
"Kate and I went to early church," said Annie.
"And what time is late church, Annie?"
"Ten thirty, Mrs. MacBirney."
"I am going myself this morning."
"And what will you wear?"
"Anything that is cool."
Alice was thinking less of what she should wear than of how she should tell her husband that she had resolved upon going to church. Painful experience had taught her what ridicule and resource of conjugal meanness to expect whenever she found courage to say she meant to go to church. Yet hope, consoling phantom, always suggested that her husband the next time might prove more amenable to reason.
When at last she managed casually to mention her momentous resolve, MacBirney showed that he had lost none of his alertness on the subject. He made use first of surprise to express his annoyance. "To church?" Then he gave vent to a contemptuous exclamation uttered with a semblance of good-natured indifference. "I thought you had got that notion pretty well out of your head, Alice."
"You have got it pretty well out for me, Walter. Sometimes it comes back. It came this morning--after a wakeful night. I haven't been for a long time."
"What church do you want to go to?"
His disingenuousness did not stir her. "To my own, of course. There is a little church in the village, you know."
"Oh, that frame affair, yes. Awfully cheap looking, isn't it? And it threatens rain again. Don't mind getting wet?"
"Oh, no, I'll take the victoria."
"You can't; Peters is going to drive me over to The Towers."
"Then give me one of the cars."
"I understand they are both out of order."
"Oh, Walter! Can't you have Peters drive you to The Towers after he takes me to Sunbury?"
"I have an engagement with Robert Kimberly at eleven o'clock."
"Could you change it a little, do you think, Walter?"
"An engagement with Robert Kimberly!"
"Or be just a little late for it?"
MacBirney used his opportunity to advantage. "Keephimwaiting! Alice, when you get an idea into your head about going to church you lose your common-sense."
She turned to the window to look at the sky. "I can't walk," she said hopelessly. Her husband made no comment. As her eyes turned toward the distant Towers she remembered that Robert Kimberly the evening before had asked--and so insistently that it had been one of the causes of her wakefulness--for permission to bring over in the morning some grapes from his hot-houses. He had wanted to come at eleven o'clock and she had assured him she should not be at home--this because, during some uneasy moments when they were close together in the car, she had resolved that the next morning she should seek if only for an hour an influence long neglected but quite removed from his. It was clear to her as she now stood at the window, that Kimberly had sought every chance to be at her personal service at eleven o'clock, even though her husband professed an engagement with him.
"Couldn't Peters," she asked, turning again to MacBirney, "drive me down half an hour earlier--before you go? I can wait at the church till he comes back after me?"
MacBirney was reading the stock-market reports in the morning paper. "All right," he said curtly.
She was contained this time. There had been occasions when scenes such as this had brought hot tears, but five years of steady battering had fairly subdued Alice.
At high mass, an hour later, villagers saw a fine lady--a Second Lake lady, they shrewdly fancied from the carriage that brought her--kneeling among them in a pew close to the altar, and quite oblivious of those about her, kneeling, too, at times when they stood or sat; kneeling often with her face--which they thought pretty--hidden in her hands as if it somehow had offended; kneeling from the credo until the stragglers in the vestibule and about the church door began to slip away from the last gospel. There was an unusual stir about the church because it was a confirmation Sunday and an archbishop, a white-haired man who had once been in charge of the little Sunbury parish himself, was present.
Alice followed the last of the congregation out of the door and into the village sunshine. She looked up and down the country road for her horses but none were in sight. Below the church where the farmers' rigs stood, a big motor-car watched by village boys was waiting. They knew that the car, with its black and olive trimmings, was from The Towers because they were familiar with the livery of the villa grooms.
Their curiosity was rewarded when they saw the fine lady come out of the church. The instant she appeared a great gentleman stepped from the black tonneau and, lifting his hat very high, hastened across the muddy road to greet her--certainly she made a picture as she stood on the church steps in her tan pongee gown with her brown hair curling under a rose-wreathed Leghorn hat.
Her heart gave a frightened jump when she saw who was coming. But when the gentleman spoke, his voice was so quiet that even those loitering near could not hear his words. There was some discussion between the two. His slight gestures as they talked, seemed to indicate something of explanation and something of defence. Then a suggestion of urgency appeared in his manner. The fine lady resisted.
From under her pongee parasol she looked longingly up the road and down for her horses, but for a while no horses came. At last a carriage looking like her own did come down the lake road and she hoped for a moment. Then as the carriage drove rapidly past her face fell.
The great gentleman indicated his annoyance at the insolent mud that spattered from the carriage wheel by a look, but he kept quite near to the fine lady and his eyes fell very kindly on her pink cheeks. Her carriage did not come even after they had gone to his car and seated themselves in the tonneau to await it. He was too clever to hurry her. He allowed her to wait until she saw her case was quite hopeless, then she told him he might drive her home.
"I came," he explained, answering an annoyed note in a second question that she asked, "because I understood you were going to church----"
"But I did not say I was."
"I must have dreamed it."
Brice, sitting at the wheel in front of them, smiled--but only within his heart--when this came to his ears; because it was Brice who had been asked during the morning where Mrs. MacBirney was and Brice who had reported. He was senior to Peters, senior to all the Second Lake coachmen and chauffeurs, and usually found out whatever he wanted to find out.
"At any rate," Kimberly laughed good-naturedly, "I have been waiting here half an hour for you."
Brice knew that this was true to the minute, for in that half-hour there had been many glances at two good watches and a hamper of hot-house grapes. Brice himself, since a certain missed train, involving language that lingered yet in his ears, carried a good watch.
But to-day not even amiable profanity, which Brice recalled as normal during extended waits, had accompanied the unusual detention. No messenger had been despatched to sound the young village priest with a view of expediting the mass and the fine lady had been in nowise interrupted during her lengthened devotions. Kimberly, in this instance, had truthfully been a model of patience.
"These are the grapes," Brice heard behind him, as he let the machine out a bit and fancied the top of the hamper being raised. "Aren't they exceptional? I found the vines in Algeria. There are lilies on this side."
An expression of involuntary admiration came from the tonneau. "Assumption lilies! For your sister?"
"No, for you. They are to celebrate the feast."
"The feast? Why, of course!" Then came a categorical question, animated but delivered with keenness: "How did you know that to-day is the feast of the Assumption?"
A bland evasion followed. "I supposed that every one knew the fifteenth of August is the feast of the Assumption. Taste this grape."
"I am very sureyoudidn't know."
"But Idid. Taste the grape."
"Who told you?"
"Whence have you the faculties of the Inquisition? Why do you rack me with questions?"
"I begin to suspect, Mr. Kimberly, that you belong on the rack."
"No doubt. At least I have spent most of my life there."
"Come, please! Who told you?"
"Francis, of course; now will you taste this grape?"
CHAPTER XIV
When MacBirney reached home with the victoria Alice had not yet taken off her hat, and a maid was bringing vases for the lilies. He had been driving toward Sea Ridge and taken the wrong road and was sorry for his delay in getting to the church. Alice accepted his excuses in good part. He tried to explain his misunderstanding about the engagement with Kimberly. She relieved his endeavors by making everything easy, telling him finally how Kimberly had brought her home and had left the grapes and lilies. When the two sat down at luncheon, MacBirney noticed Alice's preoccupation; she admitted she had a slight headache. She was glad, however, to have him ask her to go for a long motor drive in the afternoon, thinking the air would do her good, and they spent three hours together.
When they got home it was dusk. The dinner served on the porch was satisfying and the day which had opened with so little of promise seemed to do better at the close. Indeed, Alice all day had sought quiet because she had something to say which she was resolved to say this day. After dinner she remained with her husband in the moonlight. He was talking, over his cigar, of an idea for adding a strip of woodland to the lower end of their new estate, when she interrupted him.
"Should you be greatly shocked, Walter, if I said I wish we could go away from here?" She was leaning toward him on the arm of her chair when she spoke and her hands were clasped.
His astonishment was genuine. "What do you mean?"
"I don't know. Yet I feel as if we ought to go, Walter."
"What for?"
She was looking earnestly at him, but in the shadow he could not see, though he felt, her eyes.
"It is hard to explain." She paused a moment. "These people are delightful; you know I like them as much as you do."
MacBirney took his cigar from his mouth to express his surprise. "I thought you were crazy about the place and the people and everything else," he exclaimed. "I thought this was just what you were looking for! You've said so much about refined luxury and lovely manners----"
"I am thinking of all that." There was enough in her tone of an intention to be heard to cause him to forget his favorite expedient of drowning the subject in a flood of words. "But with all this, or to enjoy it all, one needs peace of mind, and my peace of mind is becoming disturbed."
Quite misunderstanding her, MacBirney thought she referred to the question of church-going, and that subject offered so much delicate ground that Alice continued without molestation.
"It is very hard to say what I meant to say, without saying too little or too much. You know, Walter, you were worried at one time about how Mr. Robert Kimberly would look at your proposals, and you told me you wanted me to be agreeable to him. And without treating him differently from any one else here, I have tried to pay particular regard to what he had to say and everything of that kind. It is awfully hard to specify," she hesitated in perplexity. "I am sure I haven't discriminated him in any way from his brother, or Mr. De Castro, for instance. But I have always shown an interest in things he had to point out, and he seemed to enjoy--perhaps more than the others--pointing things out. And----"
"Well?"
"It seems to me now as if he has begun to take an interest in everythingIdo----"
Her husband became jocular. "Oh, has he?"
Alice's words came at last bluntly. "And it completely upsets me, Walter."
MacBirney laughed again. "Why so?"
She took refuge in a shade of annoyance. "Because I don't like to think about it."
"Think about what?"
"About any man's--if I must say it--paying attention to me, except my husband."
"Now you are hitting me, aren't you, Alice? You are pretty clever, after all," declared MacBirney still laughing.
She threw herself back in her chair. "Oh, Walter, you don't understand at all! Nothing could be further from what I am thinking. I ought not to say he has been attentive enough to speak of. It is not that I dislike Mr. Kimberly. But he does somehow make me uncomfortable. Perhaps I don't understand their way here."
"Why, that is all there is to it, Alice. It's merely their way. Give it no thought. He is simply being agreeable. Don't imagine that every man that sends you flowers is interested in you. Is that all, Allie?"
"Yes." Her acuteness divined about what he would reply. "And," she added, "I think, however foolish it may sound, it is enough."
"Don't worry about bridges you will never have to cross. That's the motto I've followed."
"Yes, I know, but----"
"Just a moment. All you have to do is to treat everybody alike."
"But, Walter----"
"You would have to do that anywhere--shouldn't you? Of course. Suppose we should go somewhere else and find a man that threatened to become an admirer----"
"Don't use such a word!"
"Call it what you please--we can't keep moving away from that kind of a possibility, can we?"
"Still, Walter, I feel as if we might get away from here. I have merely told you exactly what I thought."
"We can't get away. This is where everything is done in the sugar business. This is the little world where the big moves are decided upon. If you are not here, you are not in it. We are in the swim now; it took long enough to get in it, God knows. Now let us stay. You can take care of yourself, can't you?"
"How can you ask me!"
He pursued her with a touch of harshness. "How can I ask you? Aren't you talking about running away from a situation?Idon't run away from situations. I call the man or woman that runs away from a situation, a coward. Face it down, work it out--don't dodge it."
MacBirney finished without interruption.
In the living room the telephone bell rang. He went in to answer it and his wife heard him a moment in conversation. Then on the garage wire he called up the chauffeur and ordered a car. Coming out again on the porch he explained: "Lottie wants us to come over."
"Lottie?" There was a shade of resentment, almost of contempt, in Alice's echo and inquiry.
"Lottie Nelson."
"Don't call her Lottie, Walter."
"She calls me Walter."
"She has no business to. What did you tell her? Don't let us go out to-night."
"It is a little celebration of some kind and I told her we would come."
"My head has ached all day."
"It will do your head good. Come on. I told her we were coming."
CHAPTER XV
They found a lively party at the Nelsons'. Guyot was there, with Lambert, thick-lipped and voluble. Dora Morgan with Doane and Cready Hamilton had come, worn and bedraggled, from a New England motoring trip. Dora, still quite hoarse, was singing a music-hall song when the MacBirneys entered the room.
She stopped. "My ears are crazy to-night--I can't sing," she complained, responding to Alice's greeting. "I feel as if there were a motor in my head. Tired? Oh, no, not a bit. But the dust!" Her smile died and her brows rose till her pretty eyes shone full. She threw her expiring energy into two husky words: "Somethingfierce!"
Dolly and her husband with Imogene and Charles had responded to Lottie's invitation, and Robert Kimberly came later with Fritzie Venable. Dolly greeted Alice with apologies. "I am here," she admitted with untroubled contempt, "but not present. I wanted to see what Lambert looks like. We hear so much about his discoveries. Robert doesn't think much of them."
Mrs. Nelson, languidly composed, led MacBirney to the men who were in an alcove off the music room. Near them sat Robert Kimberly talking to Imogene. Dora could not be coaxed to sing again. But the hostess meant to force the fighting for a good time. Dora joined the men and Guyot, under Nelson's wing, came over to meet Alice, who had taken refuge with Dolly. At a time when the groups were changing, Nelson brought Lambert over. But neither Alice nor Dolly made objection when his host took him away again.
Kimberly came after a while with Fritzie to Alice's divan and, standing behind it, tried by conversation and such attraction of manner as he could offer, to interest Alice. He failed to waken any response. She quite understood a woman's refuge from what she wishes to avoid and persevered in being indifferent to every effort.
Kimberly, not slow to perceive, left presently for the party in the dining-room. But even as he walked away, Alice's attitude toward him called to her mind a saying of Fritzie's, that it is not pleasant to be unpleasant to pleasant people, even if it is unpleasant to be pleasant to unpleasant people.
"Were you tired after yesterday's ride?" asked Dolly of Alice.
"Not too tired."
"Robert told you about Tennie Morgan's death."
Alice looked at her inquiringly. "How did you know?"
"You were in the Morgan chapel together. And you looked upset when you came back. I had promised to tell you the story sometime myself. I know how easy it is to get a false impression concerning family skeletons. So I asked Robert about it the minute you left the car, and I was annoyed beyond everything when he said he had told you the whole story."
"But dear Mrs. De Castro! Why should you be annoyed?"
Dolly answered with decision: "Robert has no business ever to speak of the affair." Alice could not dispute her and Dolly went on: "I know just how he would talk about it. Not that I know what he said to you. But it would be like him to take very much more of the blame on himself than belongs to him. Men, my dear, look at these things differently from women, and usually make less of them than women do. In this case it is exactly the reverse. Robert has always had an exaggerated idea of his responsibility in the tragedy--that is why it annoys me ever to have him speak about it. I know my brother better, I think, than anybody alive knows him, and I am perfectly familiar with all the circumstances. I know what I am talking about."
Very much in earnest Dolly settled back. "To begin with, Tennie was an abnormal boy. He was as delicate in his mental texture as cobweb lace. His sensitiveness was something incredible and twenty things might have happened to upset his mental balance. No one, my dear, likes to talk state secrets."
"Pray do not, then. It really is not necessary," pleaded Alice.
"Oh, it is," said Dolly decidedly, "I want you to understand. Suicide has been a spectre to the Kimberlys for ages. Two generations ago Schuyler Kimberly committed suicide at sixty-six--think of it! Oh! I could tell you stories. There has been no suicide in this generation. But the shadow," Dolly's tones were calm but inflected with a burden of what cannot be helped may as well be admitted, "seems only to have passed it to fall upon the next in poor Tennie. Two years afterward they found his mother dead one morning in bed. I don't know what the trouble was--it was in Florence. Nobody knows--there was just a little white froth on her lips. The doctors said heart disease. She was a strange woman, Bertha, strong-willed and self-indulgent--like all the rest of us."
"Don't say that of yourself. You are not self-indulgent, you are generous."
"I am both, dear. But I know the Kimberlys, men and women, first and last, and that is why I do not want you to get wrong impressions of them. My brother Robert isn't a saint, neither is Charles. But compare them with the average men of their own family; compare them with the average men in their own situation in life; compare them with the Nelsons and the Doanes; compare them with that old man that Robert is so patient with! Compare them, my dear, to the men everywhere in the world they move in--I don't think the Kimberly men of this generation need apologize particularly.
"Robert was so completely stunned by Tennie's death that for years I did not know what would happen. Then a great industrial crisis came in our affairs, though afterward it seemed, in a way, providential. Poor old Uncle John got it into his head he could make sugar out of corn and ended by nearly ruining us all. If things had gone on we should all have been living in apartments within another year. When we were so deep in the thing that the end was in sight we went to Robert on our knees, and begged him to take hold of the business and save the family--oh, it had come quite to that. He had been doing absolutely nothing for a year and I feared all sorts of things about him. But he listened anddidtake hold and made the business so big--well, dear heart, you have some idea what it is now when they can take over a lot of factories, such as those of your husband and his associates, on one year's profits. I suppose, of course, these are state secrets--you mustn't repeat them----"
"Certainly not."
"And for years they have been the largest lenders of ready money in the Street. So you can't wonder that we think a great deal of Robert. And he likes you--I can see that. He has been more natural since you came here than for years."
"Surely your brothers never can say they have not a devoted sister."
"I can't account for it," persisted Dolly, continuing. "It is just that your influence is a good one on him; no one can explain those things. I thought for years he would never be influenced by any woman again. You've seen how this one," Dolly tossed her head in disgust as she indicated Lottie Nelson, then passing, "throws herself at him." With the last words Dolly rose to say she was going home. Imogene was ready to join her, and Lottie's protests were of no avail. Charles was upstairs conferring with Nelson and Imogene went up to get him.
Alice walked to the dining-room. Her husband, in an uncommonly good-humor, was drinking with their hostess. In the centre of the room, Hamilton, Guyot, Lambert, and Dora Morgan sat at the large table. Guyot offered Alice a chair. She sat down and found him entertaining. He took her after a time into the reception room where Lottie had hung a Degas that Guyot had brought over for her. Alice admired the fascinating swiftness and sureness of touch but did not agree with Guyot that the charm was due to the merit of color over line. When the two returned to the dining-room, Kimberly stood at a cellaret with Fritzie.
Lottie and MacBirney sat with the group at the big table. "Oh, Robert," Lottie called to Kimberly as Alice appeared in the doorway, "mix me a cocktail."
Turning, Kimberly saw Alice: "I am out of practice, Lottie," he said.
"Give me some plain whiskey then."
Kimberly's shortness of manner indicated his annoyance. "You have that at your hand," he said sitting down.
"How rude, Robert," retorted Lottie, with assumed impatience. She glanced loftily around. "Walter," she exclaimed, looking across the table at Alice's husband and taking Alice's breath away with the appeal, "give me some whiskey."
"Certainly, Mrs. Nelson."
"No, stop; mix me a cocktail."
"Is your husband an expert, Mrs. MacBirney?" asked Guyot as MacBirney rose.
"Not to my knowledge," answered Alice frankly. "I hope," she added, with a touch of asperity as her husband stepped to a sideboard, "that Mrs. Nelson is not fastidious."
"It is disgusting the way my friends are behaving," complained Lottie turning to Lambert. "This is my birthday----"
"Your birthday!"
"That is why you are all here. And whoever refuses now to drink my health I cast off forever."
"Is this a regular birthday or are you springing an extra on us?" demanded Fritzie.
"Go on, MacBirney, with your mixture," exclaimed Lambert, "I'll serve at the table. You are going to join us, of course, Mrs. MacBirney?"
Alice answered in trepidation: "It must be something very light for me."
"Try whiskey, Mrs. MacBirney," suggested Dora Morgan benevolently, "it is really the easiest of all."
Alice grew nervous. Kimberly, without speaking, pushed a half-filled glass toward her. She looked at him in distress. "That will not hurt you," he said curtly.
The men were talking Belgian politics. Lambert was explaining the antiquated customs of the reactionaries and the battle of the liberals for the laicizing of education. He dwelt on the stubbornness of the clericals and the difficulties met with in modernizing their following.
Kimberly either through natural dislike for Lambert or mere stubbornness objected to the specific instances of mediævalism adduced and soon had the energetic chemist nettled. "What do you know about the subject?" demanded Lambert at length. "Are you a Catholic?"
"I am not a Catholic," returned Kimberly amiably. "I am as far as possible, I suppose, from being one. The doors of the church are wide, but if we can believe even a small part of what is printed of us they would have to be broadened materially to take in American refiners."
"If you are not a Catholic, what are you?" persisted Lambert with heat.
"I have one serious religious conviction; that is, that there are just two perfectly managed human institutions; one, the Standard Oil Company, the other the Catholic Church."
There was now a chance to drop the controversy and the women together tried to effect a diversion. But Lambert's lips parted over his white teeth in a smile. "I have noticed sometimes that what we know least about we talk best about." Kimberly stirred languidly. "I was born of Catholic parents," continued Lambert, "baptized in the Catholic Church, educated in it. I should know something about it, shouldn't I? You, Mr. Kimberly, must admit you know nothing about it." Kimberly snorted a little. "All the same, I take priests' fables for what they are worth," added Lambert; "such, for example, as the Resurrection of Christ." Lambert laughed heartily. Fritzie looked uneasily at Alice as the words fell. Her cheeks were crimsoned.
"Can a central fact of Christianity such as the Resurrection fairly be called a priests' fable?" asked Kimberly.
"Why not?" demanded Lambert with contemptuous brevity. "None but fossilized Catholics believe such nonsense!"
"There are still some Protestants left," suggested Kimberly mildly.
"No priest dictates to me," continued the chemist, aroused. "No superstition for me. I want Catholics educated, enlightened, made free. I should know something about the church, should I not? You admit you know nothing----"
"No, I did not admit that," returned Kimberly. "You admitted it for me. And you asked me a moment ago what I was. Lambert, what are you?"
"I am a Catholic--not a clerical!" Lambert emphasized the words by looking from one to another in the circle. Kimberly spread one of his strong hands on the table. Fritzie watching him shrank back a little.
"You a Catholic?" Kimberly echoed slowly. "Oh, no; this is a mistake." His hand closed. "You say you were born a Catholic. And you ridicule the very corner-stone of your faith. The last time I met you, you were talking the same sort of stuff. I wonder if you have any idea what it has cost humanity to give you the faith you sneer at, Lambert? To give you Catholic parents, men nineteen hundred years ago allowed themselves to be nailed to crosses and torn by dogs. Boys hardly seven years old withstood starvation and scourging and boys of fifteen were burned in pagan amphitheatres that you might be born a Christian; female slaves were thrown into boiling oil to give you the privilege of faith; delicate women died in shameful agonies and Roman maidens suffered their bodies to be torn to pieces with red-hot irons to give you a Christian mother--and you sit here to-night and ridicule the Resurrection of Christ! Call yourself liberal, Lambert; call yourself enlightened; call yourself Modern; but for God's sake don't call yourself a Catholic."
"Stop a moment!" cried Lambert at white heat.
Lottie put out her arm. "Don't let's be cross," she said with deliberate but unmistakable authority. "I hate a row." She turned her languid eyes on MacBirney. "Walter, what are these people drinking that makes them act in this way? Do give Mr. Kimberly something else; he began it."
Kimberly made no effort to soothe any one's feelings. And when Fritzie and Alice found an excuse to leave the room he rose and walked leisurely into the hall after them.
The three talked a few moments. A sound of hilarity came from the music room. Alice looked uneasily down the hall.
"I never knew your husband could sing," said Fritzie.
CHAPTER XVI
It dawned only gradually on Alice that her husband was developing a surprising tendency. He walked into the life that went on at the Nelson home as if he had been born to it. From an existence absorbed in the pursuit of business he gave himself for the moment to one absorbed in pursuit of the frivolous. Alice wondered how he could find anything in Lottie Nelson and her following to interest him; but her husband had offered two or three unpleasant, even distressing, surprises within as few years and she took this new one with less consternation than if it had been the first.
Yet it was impossible not to feel annoyance. Lottie Nelson, in what she would have termed an innocent way, for she cared nothing for MacBirney, in effect appropriated him, and Alice began to imagine herself almost third in the situation.
Tact served to carry the humiliated wife over some of the more flagrant breaches of manners that Mrs. Nelson did not hesitate at, if they served her caprice. MacBirney became "Walter" to her everywhere. She would call him from the city in the morning or from his bed at night; no hour was too early to summon him and none too late. The invitations to the Nelsons' evenings were extended at first both to Alice and to him. Alice accepted them in the beginning with a hopeless sort of protest, knowing that her husband would go anyway and persuading herself that it was better to go with him. If she went, she could not enjoy herself. Drinking was an essential feature of these occasions and Alice's efforts to avoid it made her the object of a ridicule on Lottie's part that she took no pains to conceal.
It was at these gatherings that Alice began to look with a degree of hope for a presence she would otherwise rather have avoided. Kimberly when he came, which was not often, brought to her a sense of relief because experience had shown that he would seek to shield her from embarrassment rather than to expose her to it.
Lottie liked on every occasion to assume to manage Kimberly together with the other men of her acquaintance. But from being, at first, complaisant, or at least not unruly, Kimberly developed mulish tendencies. He would not, in fact, be managed. When Lottie attempted to force him there were outbreaks. One came about over Alice, she being a subject on which both were sensitive.
Alice, seeking once at the De Castros' to escape both the burden of excusing herself and of drinking with the company, appealed directly to Kimberly. "Mix me something mild, will you, please, Mr. Kimberly?"
Kimberly made ready. Lottie flushed with irritation. "Oh, Robert!" She leaned backward in her chair and spoke softly over her fan. "Mix me something mild, too, won't you?"
He ignored Lottie's first request but she was foolish enough to repeat it. Kimberly checked the seltzer he was pouring long enough to reply to her: "What do you mean, Lottie? 'Mix you something mild!' You were drinking raw whiskey at dinner to-night. Can you never understand that all women haven't the palates of ostriches?" He pushed a glass toward Alice. "I don't know how it will taste."
Lottie turned angrily away.
"Now I have made trouble," said Alice.
"No," answered Kimberly imperturbably, "Mrs. Nelson made trouble for herself. I'm sorry to be rude, but she seems lately to enjoy baiting me."
Kimberly appeared less and less at the Nelsons' and the coolness between him and Lottie increased.
She was too keen not to notice that he never came to her house unless Alice came and that served to increase her pique. Such revenge as she could take in making a follower of MacBirney she took.
Alice chafed under the situation and made every effort to ignore it. When matters got to a point where they became intolerable she uttered a protest and what she dreaded followed--an unpleasant scene with her husband. While she feared that succeeding quarrels of this kind would end in something terrible, they ended, in matter of fact, very much alike. People quarrel, as they rejoice or grieve, temperamentally, and a wife placed as Alice was placed must needs in the end submit or do worse. MacBirney ridiculed a little, bullied a little, consoled a little, promised a little, and urged his wife to give up silly, old-fashioned ideas and "broaden out."
He told her she must look at manners and customs as other people looked at them. When Alice protested against Lottie Nelson's calling him early and late on the telephone and receiving him in her room in the morning--MacBirney had once indiscreetly admitted that she sometimes did this--he declared these were no incidents for grievance. If any one were to complain, Nelson, surely, should be the one. Alice maintained that it was indecent. Her husband retorted that it was merely her way, that Lottie often received Robert Kimberly in this way--though this, so far as Robert was concerned, was a fiction--and that nobody looked at the custom as Alice did. However, he promised to amend--anything, he pleaded, but an everlasting row.
Alice had already begun to hate herself in these futile scenes; to hate the emotion they cost; to hate her heartaches and helplessness. She learned to endure more and more before engaging in them, to care less and less for what her husband said in them, less for what he did after them, less for trying to come to any sort of an understanding with him.
In spite of all, however, she was not minded to surrender her husband willingly to another woman. She even convinced herself that as his wife she was not lively enough and resolved if he wanted gayety he should have it at home. The moment she conceived the notion she threw the gage at Lottie's aggressive head. Dolly De Castro, who saw and understood, warmly approved. "Consideration and peaceable methods are wasted on that kind of a woman. Humiliate her, my dear, and she will fawn at your feet," said Dolly unreservedly.
Alice was no novice in the art of entertaining; it remained only for her to turn her capabilities to account. She made herself mistress now of the telephone appointment, of the motoring lunch, of the dining-room gayety. Nelson himself complimented her on the success with which she had stocked her liquor cabinets.
She conceived an ambition for a wine cellar really worth while and abandoned it only when Robert Kimberly intimated that in this something more essential than ample means and the desire to achieve were necessary. But while gently discouraging her own idea as being impractical, he begged her at the same time to make use of The Towers' cellars, which he complained had fallen wholly into disuse; and was deterred only with the utmost difficulty from sending over with his baskets of flowers from the gardens of The Towers, baskets of wines that Nelson and Doane with their trained palates would have stared at if served by Alice. But MacBirney without these aids was put at the very front of dinner hosts and his table was given a presage that surprised him more than any one else. As a consequence, Cedar Lodge invitations were not declined, unless perhaps at times by Robert Kimberly.
He became less and less frequently a guest at Alice's entertainments, and not to be able to count on him as one in her new activities came after a time as a realization not altogether welcome. His declining, which at first relieved her fears of seeing him too often, became more of a vexation than she liked to admit.
Steadily refusing herself, whenever possible, to go to the Nelsons' she could hear only through her husband of those who frequented Lottie's suppers, and of the names MacBirney mentioned none came oftener than that of Robert Kimberly. Every time she heard it she resented his preferring another woman's hospitalities, especially those of a woman he professed not to like.
Mortifying some of her own pride she even consented to go at times to the Nelsons' with her husband to meet Kimberly there and rebuke him. Then, too, she resolved to humiliate herself enough to the hateful woman who so vexed her to observe just how she made things attractive for her guests; reasoning that Kimberly found some entertainment at Lottie's which he missed at Cedar Lodge.
Being in the fight, one must win and Alice meant to make Lottie Nelson weary of her warfare. But somehow she could not meet Robert Kimberly at the Nelsons'. When she went he was never there. Moreover, at those infrequent intervals in which he came to her own house he seemed ill entertained. At times she caught his eye when she was in high humor herself--telling a story or following her guests in their own lively vein--regarding her in a curious or critical way; and when in this fashion things were going at their best, Kimberly seemed never quite to enter into the mirth.
His indifference annoyed her so that as a guest she would have given him up. Yet this would involve a social loss not pleasant to face. Her invitations continued, and his regrets were frequent. Alice concluded she had in some way displeased him.